City of Toronto development plans for the old bus terminal at 610 Bay Street, which will get 873 apartments, an ambulance station and more, with design from star architect Jeanne Gang and others.Supplied
The City of Toronto is building exciting things. In a deal announced Thursday, the city joins private developers to create one of the most interesting mixed-use projects in Toronto.
The plan for the 1931 Toronto Coach Terminal, near Bay and Dundas streets, boosts Mayor Olivia Chow’s housing agenda. It also presents some valuable lessons about how the city can get that agenda realized: Go big, go bold, and rely on partners to drive the train.
Run by city real estate agency CreateTO, the project includes an unusual blend of activities. Its two towers will have 873 rental apartments, one-third of them with below-market rents; a paramedic station; shops and restaurants; community space; and an “organ repair centre” lab for the University Health Network. This is straight out of an architecture-school fantasy.
But it’s real. Developers Kilmer Group and Tricon Residential hope to begin construction next year and welcome residents beginning in 2030. They have hired a first-rank design team, including globally prominent Chicago architects Studio Gang; local firms architectsAlliance and Smoke Architecture; and Montreal landscape architects CCXA.
The star in this group is Jeanne Gang. Her studio has designed a 16-storey tower that will sit at 610 Bay St., rising from the former bus garage. Its façades will feature limestone panels, in a nod to the façades of the terminal. Its ground floor will now house a 23,000-square-foot station for Toronto Paramedic Services. “This is not your typical apartment building,” Ms. Gang said this week. “You’ve got these different components, different parts of the city, working together.” On the upper levels, the building’s zigzagging edges provide each apartment with diagonal views to the northeast and northwest.
Across the street to the west, a 41-storey tower by architectsAlliance will also have public space, including the organ-processing facility for the University Health Network.
Developers Kilmer Group and Tricon Residential hope to begin construction next year and welcome residents beginning in 2030.Supplied
Peter Clewes of architectsAlliance said the design calls for prefabricated panels that link the outer layer of the façade with the windows and insulation, achieving faster construction and a tighter building envelope. The metallic cladding, which Mr. Clewes hopes will be titanium, is a nod to the shimmering metal buildings of Frank Gehry.
But Mr. Clewes, one of the most prominent architects of new housing in Toronto, also said he is happy to be taking part in this socially minded project. “Most of the housing market in the last 15 years have been investor-grade condominiums,” he said. “This is the city trying to participate in the provision of affordable housing, in a realistic way. It’s something we need.”
Throughout the complex, affordable homes will be rented through partnerships with the UHN, the Hospital Workers’ Housing Co-operative and several other not-for-profits.
Between the two towers, landscape architects CCXA and Indigenous-led Smoke Architecture aim to turn Elizabeth Street into a heavily treed, pedestrian-first public space.
That change to public space is badly needed. This part of Toronto has been dominated by giant hospitals for half a century. While they are critical to the city, they are bad for the streetscape. “If you are walking around that area, there’s nothing to attract you there,” said Marc Hallé, partner at CCXA. “We aim to create a green oasis, with a tree canopy that reaches from building to building.”
Throughout the complex, affordable homes will be rented through partnerships with the UHN, the Hospital Workers’ Housing Co-operative and several other not-for-profits.Supplied
That will no doubt require bending some city rules. And while the outlines of the project have been approved by city council, the developers now need to get formal approval from City Planning – while CreateTO works alongside them to get that permission.
It’s an odd dynamic, the city negotiating with itself. But it is necessary. The city declared this site surplus in 2019, and the current development took years to come together, probably a result of the city’s complex requirements. But now Tricon and Kilmer hope to begin construction next year, and CreateTO is motivated to work with them.
In evaluating the proposals, CreateTO put emphasis on “design excellence.” It seems to be paying off. Vic Gupta, the CEO, says that such qualitative questions are important to the agency. “It’s our job to work creatively and deliver on the city’s goals, providing housing, the city’s reconciliation action plan, and others,” he said. “But we care, increasingly so, about high design.”
This stands in contrast to Toronto’s Housing Now program, which was started five years ago and led by City Planning staff. That effort sputtered for years, owing in part to intramural arguments about the physical design of new buildings. This Bay Street project shows another route for Mayor Chow’s agenda: Move as quickly as possible from plans to designs, and empower somebody to drive the train.